Clara & Black Cars
Chi ha paura di chi

Hello guys, today I want to talk to you, as always, about Italian "minor" music, but with a perspective that's closer to the Debaser reader: dedicating this page to rock and a group of little-known stalwarts of the genre in Italy at the end of the '80s, early '90s, namely Clara & Black Cars.

Composed of a brilliant and fascinating singer with a solid professional background, first in punk and then in the dance scene of the second half of the '80s, Clara Moroni (b. 1964), and a group of musicians from various origins and variously tied to the entourage of a well-known singer from Emilia, they released their first album in 1990, accompanied by some television appearances which are now forgotten.

The very name chosen by the group reveals how they attempted a difficult, yet courageous, synthesis of opposites: to unite the brilliance of the Latin melodic style ("Clara") with the Ossianic stride of Anglo-Saxon rock ("Black"... Cars), with models in mind such as Blondie, Doro *******, on one side, and Van Halen and Judas Priest on the other.

In my opinion, this resulted in a well-executed synthesis, which did not receive the success it deserved, perhaps because the audience at the time was much less accustomed to the genre than it is now, and, perhaps, due to a lack of trust from the record labels and distributors towards them, in an era when the "Next Big Thing" in the genre was John Mellencamp of Correggio and the remnants of a well-known new wave group from Florence. C'est la vie.

Musically, Black Cars handle themselves excellently, combining guitars and keyboards echoing the best FM rock of the '80s, with a solid rhythm section that never becomes excessively prominent, allowing Clara to dominate the individual tracks with a confident, enveloping, and sensual voice.

All the songs, quite catchy, easily achieve a passing grade, becoming particularly interesting especially for the lyrics and the stories of lived experiences that they narrate: Clara seems to sketch, in the individual vignettes constituted by the various songs of the album, the figure of a riot girl, irreducible and proud, trying to navigate life with passion, will, and strength, striving to reach her goals, even though she is aware that often these are unreachable milestones or dreams destined to leave nothing behind.

A female figure that breaks away from the clichés, still in vogue in Italian pop at the time, of the woman devoted to the domestic hearth, to become the only one, autonomous, responsible for her own choices, as is evident in the reflective "Che si fa" (the start of an adventure, and perhaps a love) and "Chi ha paura di chi" (the end of a relationship, destined to leave debris, which each will gather in their own way). The disintegration of relationships is described, not without cynicism, in "Motel Proxima", almost a chronicle of a stolen and clandestine love, between provincial motels and highways, where everything is peripheral, including feelings and the very possibility of a happy future.

A disenchanted look at the real world, and an aspiration towards the infinite destined to remain unknowable emerge, instead, in the splendid "Dove cadono le nuvole", where Clara acknowledges, on one hand, the boredom, the meaninglessness of passing days, questioning the ineffable meaning of things, while, in "Vivo", the more incisive rhythms of bass and drums almost describe the continuous passage of days without a reason, where haste and activism are only timid palliatives to mask the emptiness of things.

In this general lack of directions and certainties, it seems that for Clara the true compass is given by her passion for music: "Quando suoneranno gli Stones" sounds like a declaration of love towards rock, and parallelly towards the wild side of each of us, almost as the last form of resistance against the standardization in the face of an impending apocalypse. "Sogni che (down in L.A.)", tenderly and lucidly describes the ambitions of glory of a musician, America as the land of the possible that perhaps will never come to be realized... a world of dreams, where perhaps all that remains is to ask the dust, as some writer might have said.

After another - unfortunate - album, the group disbanded, merging into the band of the well-known Emilian singer I mentioned above. Clara still sings, has her own production company, and remains as fascinating as ever: she may not have become a rock star, but perhaps that's okay; it's okay like this.

Dustily Yours,

Il_Paolo